Does Social Media Influence Your SEO?

Back in 2010, Google said they do use social media as a ranking factor when it comes to search results.

In 2014, Google backtracked a little and said it didn’t use it as a ranking factor, but it treated social media pages like any other URL.

So if Google can’t make up their minds, how are we supposed to?

Does Social Media Influence Your SEO?

Social media accounts are web pages in themselves. As such, Google can use them just as they would any other web page. While having a social media account, or posting regularly doesn’t in itself help your organic rankings, there are signals that are sent from these accounts which can influence what appears on the search results page.

Links In Profiles

Link building has long been a priority when it comes to SEO. Back in the days before blogging and content, it was all about the links – the good, the bad and the ugly.

These days, links from high authority websites are the most desirable. By creating accounts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google My Business, you’re getting some pretty easy links right there from some of the most authoritative websites in the world.

Links From Content Sharing

Everyone wants their posts to go viral on social media.

If you write a great post on your blog and then share the URL on social media, there’s a much bigger chance of your blog being picked up and shared.

If you have posts which link back to your website, that resonate with people, chances are they’re going to share it. Facebook and Twitter make it super easy for users to hit share or retweet.

The more your content is shared on social media, the more links to your content are being created.

Driving Traffic To Your Website

Sharing your content isn’t just valuable for adding a link on social media. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website.

If you’re getting a good number of website visitors, from any source, it can act as a sign to Google that your website is worth visiting, and therefore worth returning as a search result.

Influence Local SEO

Local SEO relies on something called NAP – name, address and phone number. Having these three details consistent across websites is crucial for ranking well in your local area.

Not only do local citation websites help with local SEO (Yellow Pages, True Local, etc), but social media accounts do too.

Always include a link to your website as well, so Google can see your website is associated with those details (and so people know where to find you online!).

Brand Awareness

When you’ve got social media accounts across different platforms, it can help you to make sure your business takes over the first page of the search results.

If someone Google’s your brand name, you don’t just want your website to be the first result. You want other links to your business across the web to appear as results too. With social accounts set up, you could have your website, Facebook page, Twitter account and others taking up the rest of the results on page one of Google.

This helps with your brand awareness so people can find you on their platform of choice and check you out (so make sure it’s up to date and consistent!).

We hope we’ve answered the question of how does social media influence your SEO. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.